Alan Srbljanin NextGen 09

Digital Britain - are we on the right track?… Next Gen09 Leeds, Royal Armouries, 17th Nov 2009 Dr. Alan Srbljanin, Transport & Connectivity Advisor ~ A Personal View ~ alans@emd.org.uk 0115 988 8562 1

We are already living in a Digital Britain We are connected at home and at work and increasingly on the move. As citizens, we shop online buying books and holidays, we bank, we pay our rates, we study our ancestry, we renew our passports and we buy our car tax. The public sector gives us telemedicine, mobile phone parking tickets and the Oyster card. As businesses we complete electronic tax returns, we trade online, we operate across continents, across time zones and along complex supply chains. … We do all this and many more things beside in our digital world. We can confidently say we are already living in a Digital Britain. (source: RDA response to Digital Britain, Mar09) 2 of 10

Are we on the right Track? NO ...we are on the slow track 3 of 10

But how much speed do you need? I haven't got a clue...but fibre can deliver it... …in April 2009 average broadband speeds in the UK were 4.1Mbit/s, which was equivalent to 57% of the average advertised headline speed. … Actual speeds were significantly lower in the peak evening hours. Average speeds between 8pm and 10pm were 3.7Mbit/s (source: Ofcom, UK broadband speeds 2009:8). …the first commercial fibre optic connection in April 1977 in Long Beach California was 6 Mbit/s requiring 2 fibres, one for each way of communication. … At the moment there are systems commercially available that allow the usage of 160 colours on a single fibre, giving a total of 3.2Terabit/s on a single fibre. In laboratories speeds of up to 25Tbit/s have been reached (source: OECD, Developments in fibre technologies & investment, Apr08). The fastest residential broadband offer in the OECD in October 2008 was 1 Gbit/s from the Japanese operator K Opticom (source: OECD Communications Outlook 2009:107). 4 of 10

My Broadband Manifesto for the UK In descending order of desirability:  Fibre to the Premises – PTP  Fibre to the Premises – GPON  Fibre to the Cabinet  ADSL and variants  Long Range Wireless  Satellite 5 of 10

We don’t move forward by looking backwards 6 of 10

We don’t move forward by looking backwards  "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." (Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943).  "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.“ (Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science,1949).  "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." (Ken Olson, president, chairman & founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977). 7 of 10

We don’t move forward by looking backwards This is a commercial market with quite a lot of players and it obeys normal economic drivers…[there]…are large pieces of geography, sparsely inhabited, where broadband roll out will not be achievable in economic terms at least within 10 and possibly 20 years. (source: Sir Christopher Bland, BT Chairman, evidence to Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport 5th Feb 2002) 8 of 10

The future will not be like the past The Laws of Disruption, Larry Downes, (2009) MOORE’S LAW METCALFE’S LAW computing power doubles every the power of a network increases year or so exponentially with each new user No one knows how much bandwidth we will need in the future but you can guarantee it will be more than now. 9 of 10

End note… You don’t need to speculate about a Digital Britain we live there already. A pilot is not a plan. We should be putting in place the building blocks of a Next Generation Digital Britain The UK needs a fibre manifesto NOW. 10 of 10

Alan Srbljanin NextGen 09

by Marit Hendriks on Nov 19, 2009

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Alan Srbljanin NextGen 09 — Presentation Transcript